Monday, June 18, 2012

Collaboration

We know that nothing is created in a vacuum. Ideas, inspiration, color choices, themes, resolution to small problems, all these things are enlivened by our various associations.

It is a great luxury to meet with people who understand, much less practice the same crafts. I've recently been traveling, and also just returned from Spindle Camp III, held in the foothills nearby with members of my local fiber guild. At both places there were happy people, forward thinkers, people who get things done, people who do things, not just talk about them.

A colleague in Missoula had a room across the hall. With the luxury of time, we rambled on about weaving, spinning, dyeing ad infinitum. We met at length with another colleague, whose 50 years as a weaver have given her a unique perspective. I also met and reconnected with dozens of weavers and spinners in my classes, all of whom make contributions to my work, my life, my thinking in various and unpredictable ways.

I love to spin with friends, meet with people at conferences, go to my book group, talk to the people who happen by at my local yarn store; all these conversations, whether fiber-related or not, affect the work I do.

I also read blogs, read forums online about spinning, weaving and knitting, and love to ramble through photos of work being done: Ravelry is especially useful for this.

Seek out people of like mind. Find your people. Find people who are positive and happy, who think for themselves. Find people who make things, who build and grow and play, who think there is always something new to try. You'll know your people: if they make you happy, if you can laugh and learn, and if they inspire you, if you feel happy when you are with them.

Wednesday, June 06, 2012

A Thing

This week I made a Thing.

It's crap.

I'm calling it a prototype.

The thing is (hee!), it was fun to make. I have wanted to put this Thing together for months, maybe over a year. I used leftovers, fabrics and bands with mistakes in them already, broken things, and put them all together to make the new Thing.

In other words, I used crap to make crap.

I love it. It's not beautimous. It's not show-worthy. It's useful but not quite right, not fully realized, a bit jarring to look at.

And now I know. I know how all this planning and thinking has turned out.

Crap.

I knew I was making crap, but I had to see how it ended. Perhaps it's not done yet; I have to find more crap to throw at it, and then it will be done. If you keep working on something that is nothing does it turn into something? When do you call it crap and move on, using the information to make Not-crap?

I had such fun making it I could hardly stop. Every time I made Yet Another Mistake, I shrugged and moved on. This is definitely an indicator that the Thing is not the goal, that the process is the goal. I had to see. I had to keep at it. I had to finish the poor bedraggled Thing.